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I feared Colasoft had disappeared. A while ago I had won an NFR license for that lovely ping tool but after the last wannacry outbreak i opted for safety and reinstalled my machine from scratch. Too bad but I couldn't reactivate it anymore and now the laptop died too. Kind of loved the Colasoft ping tool 😊

Colasoft is proud to be named as a Visionary in 2018 "Gartner Magic Quadrant for Network Performance Monitoring and Diagnostics," authored by Sanjit Ganguli, Vivek Bhalla, and Pankaj Prasad, published on February 21, 2018.

A Magic Quadrant provides a graphical competitive positioning of four types of technology providers, in markets where growth is high and provider differentiation is distinct: Leaders, Visionaries, Niche Players, and Challengers.(*)

This is the first time Colasoft NPMD products has been evaluated by Gartner, and we could not be more proud to be positioned in the Visionaries quadrant.

Colasoft has dedicated itself to the development of NPMD (network performance monitoring and diagnostics) software and hardware solutions since 2001. Over the past 17 years, Colasoft has developed new and enhanced products to meet the evolving customer needs. Its NPMD solution includes the following products and features:

nChronos-Captures 100% of all data captured for real-time analysis as well as historical playback. It deliver the capability of 24x7 continuous packet capturing, unlimited data storage, efficient data mining and in depth traffic analysis.

Colasoft UPM-Focus on business-oriented network performance management. It is capable of monitoring service quality of all respects of a business network and quickly detecting and pinpointing problems affecting performance and stability of key business.

To be named in Gartner MQ is a good beginning of 2018 for us. Colasoft will continue to work hard on network performance and diagnostics solution development to bring new possibilities.

Gartner does not endorse any vendor, product or service depicted in its research publications, and does not advise technology users to select only those vendors with the highest ratings or other designation. Gartner research publications consist of the opinions of Gartner's research organization and should not be construed as statements of fact. Gartner disclaims all warranties, expressed or implied, with respect to this research, including any warranties of merchantability or fitness for a particular purpose.

Capsa network analyzer provided VoIP analysis since v7.8 and made improvement
in v10.0. Now, Capsa network analyzer v11.1 supports both SIP and H.323
protocol, and it can also analyze RTP media flow when signaling packets are not
captured.

Voice over Internet Protocol (also voice over IP, VoIP or
IP telephony) is a methodology and group of technologies for the
delivery of voice communications and multimedia sessions over Internet
Protocol(IP) networks, such as the Internet, Intranet or LAN. Nowadays,
VoIP is used widely because of the cheap price and convenience.

Capsa, a portable network performance analysis and diagnostics tool, provides tremendously powerful and comprehensive packet capture and analysis solution with an easy to use interface allowing both veteran and novice users the ability to protect and monitor networks in a critical business environment. Capsa aids in keeping you assessed of threats that may cause significant business outage.

Capsa is a network analyzer that allows you to monitor network traffic, troubleshoot network issues and analyze packets. By providing vivid graphs, informative statistics and real-time alerting via a well-designed GUI, Capsa allows IT administrators to identify, diagnose, and solve both wired and wireless network problems in real time, monitor user activities on their networks, and ensure their network's communication assets are safe.

With the development of network security, HTTPS is a protocol for secure communication over a computer network and now is widely used on the Internet. As everything in the HTTPS message is encrypted, including the headers, and the request/response load, the analyzer can only know that a connection is taking place between the two parties and their domain names and IP addresses, which makes it really hard for the IT engineers to fully monitor the network. However, this is not an issue with Capsa anymore. Capsa 9.2 is able to decrypt HTTPS packets and to see more details.

Packet before the decryption:

Packet after the decryption:

In order to decrypt HTTPS packets with Capsa, you need to configure the decryption settings first.

To go to the decryption settings, click the menu button on the top-left corner, and go to the Options.

Application analysis counts a lot in securing enterprise network. Capsa v9.2 brings an application analysis function. More than 1,800 built-in applications are provided, including the popular applications as Amazon, Email, Facebook, Google, Web, Youtube, etc. Besides the built-in applications, users can customize applications for private network services. Custom applications can be defined based on IP address, port number, protocol, packet pattern, and combinations thereof. With application analysis function, network administrators will have a better understanding and control of network traffic, which makes network monitoring and troubleshooting easier.

HTTPS is a protocol for secure communication over network, which is widely used on the Internet. With this safer protocol, it becomes more complicated to analyze the traffic today. And considering this circumstance, Capsa v9.2 adds HTTPS decryption capability to enable users to decrypt the HTTPS message with the right configuration of key file.

Moreover, Capsa v9.2 adds more than 200 new protocols, which enhance protocol recognition capability. And users could select a certain medium type to capture or replay the packets. Also, a Dup ACK mark and a Retransmission mark are added to the packet decoding window to facilitate protocol decoding.

"Colasoft R&D department involves optimizing Capsa to satisfy users’ needs of network analysis.” said Eddie Gao, CTO at Colasoft, “Also, we add new features to Capsa v9.2 to meet with the increasingly complex network environment, in order to provide a functional tool for our users.”

Keith Townsend, blogging for CTO Advisor, recalled the time when Ethernet defeated token ring in the "LAN wars" of the 1990s by accelerating its throughput from 10 Mbps to 100 Mbps, while token ring failed to exceed 16 Mbps. In modern Ethernet, the same debate over raw speed is back, as customers decide between 25 Gbps and 40 Gbps. Both standards were ratified in 2010, but many large companies like Google and Microsoft have formed a consortium to promote 25 Gbps as the modern Ethernet standard.

According to Townsend, in purpose-built data centers, 25 Gbps makes more sense. It is easy to aggregate 25 Gbps links to reach 100 Gbps, and the switches for both 25 Gbps and 100 Gbpsshare components. Nevertheless, networking vendors like Cisco have focused on 40 Gbps so far and only recently began selling 25 Gbps for top-of-rack switches. In Townsend's view, 25 Gbps and, above all, decoupled white box systems are the wisest options to satisfy the modern Ethernet needs of most companies.

Storing the packet files on the server can be really helpful for retrospective analysis. However, it may come to a point that you don’t have enough storage space. In order to expand the storage space, you consider adding one more hard disk to the server. Unfortunately, CentOS won’t automatically create a partition for the new disk. So you need to create a partition by yourself. Please follow the steps below to do so:

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About Colasoft

Colasoft has dedicated itself to the development of innovative packet analysis and network performance management solutions since 2001. Besides offering real-time and retrospective network analysis software to organizations of all sizes, we are providing customized network and application performance management solutions to enterprises worldwide. Colasoft is a fast-growing company with more than half million users in over 110 countries.